Kashmir dispute a threat to regional peace: APHC

Srinagar, May 10, 2015 (PPI-OT): In occupied Kashmir, the All Parties Hurriyet Conference leaders have said that the unresolved Kashmir dispute poses a serious threat to the future of the people of Pakistan, India and Kashmir and it can be avoided only by hammering out its amicable settlement.

Senior APHC leader, Professor Abdul Ghani Butt, addressing a daylong delegate session of his party, Muslim Conference Jammu and Kashmir, at Eidgah in Botango area of Sopore, today, said that Jammu and Kashmir belonged to the Kashmiris and only they would decide its future. He said that the refusal of the Indian rulers to accept Jammu and Kashmir as a conflict despite the international agreements for its settlement showed their intellectual bankruptcy.

The APHC Chairman, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, who was placed under house arrest in Srinagar by the puppet authorities to prevent him from attending the session, in his telephonic address said that arrests and other repressive measures could not subdue the Kashmiris’ freedom sentiment. He said that resolution of the lingering dispute in accordance with the Kashmiris’ aspirations was imperative for ensuring durable peace in South Asia. Others who addressed the function included Mukhtar Ahmed Waza, Engineer Hilal Ahmed War, Musaddiq Aadil and Abdul Manan Bukhari.

Meanwhile, a report released by the Research Section of KMS on Mother’s Day, today, said that thousands of Kashmiri women continued to wait for the return of their sons who had been subjected to disappearance in custody by Indian troops in occupied Kashmir over the past 26 years. It pointed out that the troops had subjected over 8,000 Kashmiris to custodial disappearance during the period and the mothers of majority of these disappeared people had been looking for the whereabouts of their loved ones for the past several years.

Nine political prisoners, who were on hunger strike since Wednesday in Baramulla jail, were hospitalized after their condition deteriorated. Three of the detainees were shifted to Srinagar for specialized treatment. The prisoners went on strike to protest undue delay in the disposal of their cases.

The security personnel of the puppet Chief Minister, Mufti Muhammad Sayeed, thrashed journalists during his visit to Islamabad. Eyewitnesses told media that when the puppet Chief Minister was leaving the district hospital, scribes working with different news channels tried to approach him for brief interaction, but the police subjected them to torture.